Are these being measured all under 20,000 years? Carbon-14 has it's limits, which is the reason I don't trust it.
Michael
:guitar:
Hogwash. You don’t trust it because you don’t want to trust it. If many of the dates determined by C14 are accurate, then a recent creation cannot be a fact, and that is something you cannot countenance.
Yes, C-14 has its limits, as does every measurement system I know of, whether it be measuring time, distance, mass, charge, density, conductivity, IQ, or whatever. And, with equal justification, I could declare that I don’t trust any measurement system that I find gives answers I am uncomfortable with. But I, unlike you, actually follow the evidence, even if it means I have to relinquish some cherished beliefs.
If, as some Christians assert, the evidence from true science leads to their particular concept of God, then I will have no choice but to follow the evidence down that path. But in fact, science has been one of the major reasons a huge number of pre-eminent scientists have turned away from religion. It may be popular for Christians to cheer for their team, and even pretend that it is winning, sans looking at the actual score, but in science that is not a very honest approach.
But back to the limits of C14 for dating – since the half-life of C14 is just under 6,000 years (near the time of the Genesis creation), many good biological samples give highly repeatable dates back that far. In fact, samples with as little as 1/16 of the C-14 remaining are commonly found. But 1/16 of the C14 means the sample has been around for 4 half-lives (½ x ½ x ½ x ½ = 1/16), or about 23,000 years. Kinda hard to do that if creation was only 7,000 years or so ago. C14 dates beyond 50,000 years have been made, but these are often less reliable than younger dates, simply because the older dates involve working with microscopic amounts of residual C14, and any contamination can seriously skew the measurements.
To me it seems almost like a type of cognitive dissonance when (and this is frequently seen) Christians argue that diamonds (which should be millions of years old, with no C-14 left in them) have been C14 dated at 50,000 years old. Supposedly this shows that C14 dating is poppy-****. But notice, what they do is shine their accusatory light on those extreme cases where someone sneezing in the far end of a C14 dating laboratory would leave enough C-14 in the suspended moisture droplets to foul delicate measurements up for the next several hours. Why is it, if the diamond was actually the product of a 7,000 year ago creation, that it doesn’t show that it still has almost 1/2 of its original C-14, just like real 7000 year old wood and bone and tissue samples do?
As the articles I mentioned in my prior post show, many Christian archaeologists are savvy enough to know that C-14 is a great tool for dating old campfires, hides, wooden tools, and such, to prove those things were in use as expected in Old Testament times. But C14 dating seems, in the fundamentalist Christian mind, to suddenly become unreliable just at the point they need it to, about 7,000 years ago. Meanwhile, real scientists, not beholden to tribal creation stories, find that C14 dating shows dates of 15,000 and 20,000 years ago are easily in the range that can be cross-checked by alternate dating methods.